


Plateau Eighty-Nine

by itwascitizenkane



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Hermann is awesome, M/M, Mind Control, Oh hey it's another fix-it fic, Possession, Suicidal Thoughts, but it's okay because Hermann has a cat, cats make the world go round, i.e. the working title of Uprising, slow-burn, the Precursors are dicks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 09:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14186124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itwascitizenkane/pseuds/itwascitizenkane
Summary: Months after the Precursors' control over Newt is revealed, Hermann is desperate for things to change, for both their sakes. But as things begin to shift rapidly, bringing his friend's future into question, it becomes doubtful if anything will ever return to normal. (Whatever normal is.) Hermann struggles to find a constant in the middle of it all, while also trying to bring Newton back.





	Plateau Eighty-Nine

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! So, just watched Uprising, and I have... feelings. Which, as usual, I'm gonna shoot at the Internet, to try to make 'em go away. Please let me know if I make any terrible mistakes (in terms of the fic, not just generally), and please enjoy!

**04:37, November 4th 2025**

Newt loves after-parties.

Maybe it's only because all the after-parties he's been to have always been infinitely better than the actual event that they followed - a few badly thought-out weddings and also _the freaking apocalypse_ spring to mind - but they always seem to have a wild, carefree, “que sera sera” vibe to them, which he is a hundred percent down with right now. In all honesty his brain could be akin to meatloaf in a matter of hours, with the shit he's been putting it through. But who _cares_ , right?

At this moment, having had a tequila shot, a few vodka colas and a little of the Hong Kong street food that somebody was giving out, his thoughts are running at a nice fluid kind of walking pace which he sort of enjoys, but would scare the living shit out of him if he thought it was anything other than temporary. (He's gonna end up writing a full-on _book_ about all this, probably with Hermann criticizing everything he writes, so he can't afford to slow down. Not yet.) Luckily the sugar is levelling it out, giving him a little buzz. Funny how global rationing in wartime switches up the hierarchy in the Shatterdome, especially during celebrations as huge as this one. The person who set up a makeshift bar directly under the war clock (now displaying nine proud and permanent zeros) was insanely popular at first. But then someone started a rumor that Tendo Choi had been hoarding peanut butter cups for a special occasion and was sharing them out in the cafeteria, and it was like moths to an overworked, bow-tie-wearing flame. A flame who, as it turns out, doesn't even like peanut butter.

“Ali’s allergic,” Tendo explains, having to pretty much yell into Newt’s right ear over the crappy speakers blaring music. The Shatterdome may be historically understaffed by this point, but cafeterias always make it noisier and more crowded than seems possible. “Crazy allergic, I mean. First time we went to dinner, she got tingly because I ate PB&J at lunch. Haven't touched the stuff since.”

“Yeah, well, you can get your untainted ass back to San Francisco now this is over, right?”

“Too right I can!” Tendo bellows back, grinning widely. “Just have to help with clear-up of LOCCENT, then after that I can see Alison, I can see my son, I can…” He suddenly falls silent, biting his lip, his smile turning into something no less joyful, but more raw with emotion than Newt is exactly comfortable with, even on a good day.

“Okay.” Newt pats his friend’s shoulder awkwardly. “No more alcohol for you. I'll... go get you some water.”

He goes down to ground floor, and makes his way through the pressing crowd around the bar, ducking and weaving, running a hand through his hair as a nervous gesture. It almost gets stuck in there. At some point he's gonna have to take a shower and get this Kaiju gunk off of himself, because besides being slightly toxic it's kind of slicked his hair back so he looks like a hobbit crossed with an extra from _West Side Story_ , and won't people be taking pictures at some point for posterity or some shit? They'll show the photos to their grandkids one day, and they'll ask: “Hey, Grandma, who's that ugly guy in the top right corner?” “That, Timmy, is the terrible 1930s film star impersonator that saved our planet.”

In the middle of this unpleasant thought, he suddenly bumps into Hermann, who is coming from the other direction. They stumble, apologize, and then stare at each other. It's not so much the shock of seeing each other as it is surprise of not having been together the whole time. In the middle of a crowd of people who are essentially strangers, it's… jarring.

In the middle of this strange, elongated moment, a small geeky part of Newt’s brain (okay, maybe it’s slightly bigger than he'd like to think) is kind of reminded of the moment in Doctor Who when Bill Potts met the cute puddle girl who she eloped with at the end of the season. And wait - no - this is weird, because it's exactly the same, they've even got _Joy Division_ playing on the speakers, and what point is there to comparing a collision with _Hermann_ of all people to a romantic meeting at a bar?

Which of course is the opposite to what this is.

Man, he was hit super hard when Bill got converted into a Mondasian cyber-lesbian.

That thought’s over now, Newton, shush.

Oh god, Hermann’s looking at him weird. How long has he been quiet? He should say something, he should really _really say something now._

“You…” Hermann tilts his head to one side, as if Newt’s an interesting optical illusion, like if he squints hard enough he'll turn into a picture of a pipe or something like that. “You really do look terrible, Newton,” he finally says.

The weird tension between them promptly collapses like a flat tire.

“Thanks, Hermann,” replies Newt sarcastically, raising the sleeve of his leather jacket to wipe at the dirt-smeared lenses of his glasses. To his annoyance, it just makes it worse. “You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself, y'know? Having just saved the world and everything.”

“ _When routine bites hard, and ambitions are low…_ ” Ian Curtis drones in the background. “ _And resentment rides high, but emotions won't grow…_ ”

“Would you rather get out of here?” asks Hermann curiously. It's not meant as a rhetorical question, Newt realizes; it's Hermann trying to figure out whether it's him who wants to escape the crowds and the noise, or whether it's the emotions and preferences left behind by the drift.

Newt knows, because he's been second-guessing himself for the last three hours they've been apart; wondering if what he just said or thought was a little too Hermann-like to really be _him_. At one point he asked Tendo if he'd “care to inhale yet another tequila sample”, and had to bang his head against something until he felt sane again.

“Yeah,” he finally declares, in response to Hermann’s question. He doesn't think it's him - he's always been fuelled by crowds - but what the hell. “Can't hear my genius rockstar thoughts in here. Lab?”

“Yes, the lab will do well.”

They walk along the corridor in sync. Which is weird, because Hermann’s bad leg should throw them off, but somehow it works. Maybe it's the alcohol in Newt’s system, or whatever Hermann’s had at this point (brandy, probably), but they tail off before reaching their now obsolete headquarters, and dawdle in the corridor instead.

“So…”

“So.”

“We won.”

Hermann gives a bark of laughter. “Indeed,” he agrees, slightly breathless, leaning his head back until it touches the metal wall. As he subtly puts his weight back on the vertical surface with a grimace of relief, Newt pretends not to notice, and determinedly avoids looking at the hollow of his throat. “We won. We really, truly did.”

“How's it feel to be a rockstar mathematician?” Newt probes, grinning. Hermann doesn't smile as much as he deserves to, so he might as well milk it like one of his Kaiju organs while he still can.

“It feels…” He watches as the man trawls mentally through all the different pieces of slang he's heard over the years, in at least eight different languages. At last, Hermann settles, with a subtle expression of triumph, on “... _wicked_.”

“It does. Different, though.” Yes. That’s the word he’d use to describe it. Different, since they drifted with the baby Kaiju (whose name and designated place on his skin Newt is still figuring out). Different, since he felt the unimaginable rage of the mini Otachi screaming _DIRECTIVE DIRECTIVE DIRECTIVE,_  crying out desperately for ordersuntil the sound was permanently bored into the back of his skull. Different, since the memories of his uptight lab partner were laid all around him, perfectly organised like a city, made of pain and boredom and joy and wonder and fear in varying measures.

Not good and not bad either - Newt is in no state to make that kind of evaluation yet. Just… different. Very.

The music echoing through the building abruptly switches to a Tony Christie number called  _Is This The Way To Amarillo_. Whoever the DJ is, they definitely needs a psych assessment more than Newt does.

“Hey, you uh, feeling Kaiju-ish at all?” he jokes, elbowing Hermann lightly in the ribs. "Got the urge to seek out large cities and steal everybody's left shoe?"

“No.” The man's expression suddenly sharpens. “What about you?”

“Pff. _No._ If I _was_ turning evil, I wouldn't be here. I'd be at MIT, finishing my awesome exposition-y villain song. I was thinking it'd be like…” Newt pauses, then takes a breath, deepening his voice as low as it will allow without failing him. “ _Men and Kaiju, hear my prayer-_ ”

“No, Newton.”

“I can skip straight to the bridge?”

Hermann just shakes his head, biting back another smile. “It's ‘Men and Kaijus’, not ‘Men and Kaiju’. Unless you mean it’s one singular beast, who is unbelievably putting up with your narcissistic ballad along with the men.”

“Well, yeah, but it's Kaiju when it's plural too, right?”

“It most certainly is not.”

“Yes it is! I heard the Marshall say it like a million times!”

“Well, he said it incorrectly!”

“Show a dead man some respect!” Newt halts abruptly. “Oh. Oh, damn. Well, my point is, you're wrong. Next time we're both semiconscious at the same time, we are hacking into the security cams and we are _settling this_ -” His phone abruptly rings in his pocket. Retro phone sound, obviously, because he rocks. “I'm just gonna get this.” He flips the face outwards with his thumb (yeah, it's also a flip-phone) and brings it to his ear without looking at the screen.

“Whaddup?”

* * *

He packs his clothes and his Kaiju memorabilia, and cleans his side of the lab when no one else but Marshall Hansen is still awake. By the time Hermann shows up at the lab two days later to archive whatever he can (and sterilise everything he can't), Newt is long gone. Tendo never gets that glass of water. For a long time, it's as though the man has disappeared off the face of the planet.

* * *

**16:21, February 21st 2027**

Newt’s always loved a soundtrack to his work, and that never changed (even when everything else did). So he hums to the tune of _Like A Star_ by Mike Krol as he feeds the heavy cable out from the eerie tank in the corner and fixes it to the helmet.

His helmet, that is. The one that he will soon be wearing.

Ding-ding-ding, it’s all powered up, it’s all sorted, so he fixes the drift helmet (still with the useless second helmet attached) and presses the button on the top to make it clench around his temples like a painful game of Bop It.

“Alright, Alice,” he says aloud, even though the brain isn’t connected to any ears and can’t hear him. He fingers another button on the interface panel he's holding. He's getting a whole lot of button action today. “Let’s do this shit. Going in, in three, two…”

For a moment, he is thrown off-guard as the phrase sets off a strange memory. A view, from someone else’s eyes, of him twitching and seizing on the floor of a leaky laboratory, much less shiny and equipped than the one he’s currently in. The taste of blood and the screaming of the Hive. A voice muttering “what have you done” over and over and over and -

But this is different, his mind tells him reassuringly. The Hive wants to welcome him, not scare him off like last time. He’ll be able to be part of something, something meaningful, for the first time in a long time. He'll be okay this time, because this time it’s different. We promise.

 _“I'm like a star_  
_I'm burning out fast_  
_I try to shine, but it's never gonna l_ ast--”

“Damn right it’s different,” he growls, forcing the thoughts from his head. “Alright, screw countdowns. We are _doing this._ ”

 _Shitshitshit,_ says a small panicked part of his brain, _this isn’t right, I’m not meant to be here, what is this? I’m gonna end up a cautionary tale, I’m like Sméagol with the One Ring, I’m like -_

He presses the button, and suddenly Newt isn’t “like” anything anymore.

His eyes close as his senses disconnect. His mind floods with blue.

And the Precursors take possession.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a kudos and/or comment if you liked this first chapter. Thank you for reading this!


End file.
